The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,15

the drawers and cleaning off the table. I glance up at the dried oatmeal that’s still on the ceiling from another trip when things went flying in the wake of a ferry, combined with some nasty weather. If Mom were still on the boat, she’d probably go apeshit because nobody’s bothered to clean it up, but I think Dad and Uncle Gorky use it as a reminder to put things away. Or maybe she’s right and they’re just lazy.

I can feel my frustration about not being able to dance start to slip away, even though part of me wants to hold on to it—to roll it around like a hard little stone in my pocket, mine and mine alone.

Even if I do wish I could dance, it smells so much better in this part of Alaska, thanks to the minty Tongass rain forest with its huge cedars and hemlocks and all its lush greenery. Up north the skinny black spruce trees look like they’re constantly trying to fill their lungs, their roots suffocating underground in permafrost. Same state, two climates, each as different as my parents; and like my parents, there’s a part of me in both.

—

“Dad, I’m going up on the flying bridge.” I grab my life jacket on the way out. I want to practice that last combination we learned just before I left so I don’t forget it.

On the flying bridge the smells are even stronger, trying to draw me out of myself. Salt and mint and fish and wind, mingled with diesel. My arms and legs relax, as if they are made of moss. I used to pretend my parents found me in the rain forest, a magical creature born of spongy muskeg and old man’s beard. It seems almost possible now as I spin around a couple times, trying to get my sea legs, feeling the rhythm of the boat making its own dance.

And there she is, the Pelican, my inflatable blue raft that has been my best friend on this boat every summer of my life. She knows me better than anyone, and when I climb inside her my whole body relaxes and I can hear her whisper how happy she is that I am back. I drift slowly off to sleep.

A while later I wake up groggy and not sure where I am, feeling the Squid pounding beneath the wake of another boat. The Matanuska ferry is passing us, and nearby is a pod of orcas, closer than I’ve ever seen them get to a boat that large. And then I see something else that shouldn’t be there. Even if I yelled, no one would hear me. It isn’t until it’s too late that my voice finally finds its way out of my throat, but by then I can’t tell whether it’s me or the orcas that are screaming.

If I didn’t believe that people we love are still taking care of us after they die, I wouldn’t be sitting here now, hugging my knees, surrounded by baggage, trying not to wiggle or sneeze. Fourteen-year-old Jack is asleep with his head lying against a canvas army bag with a Seattle address—looking for all the world like he sleeps every day of his life in a baggage cart bound for the lower forty-eight. My other brother, Sam, is sixteen, just a year younger than me; but he’s a dreamy, innocent sixteen, so naive it scares me sometimes. He’s not as relaxed as Jack at the moment, maybe because his long legs barely fit in the cart and he’s pulled them up to his chin. Also because he’s not so sure stowing away on the ferry was a very good idea.

But we’re doing it anyway, stowing away on the M/V Matanuska. And before you start wondering if my elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor, I should say right now that between me and Jack and Sam, I’m not only the oldest, I’m also the most levelheaded.

—

“Will we still be able to go out on deck and look for orcas?” Sam asked, as if he needed a better excuse than just getting away from my mother’s awful boyfriend, Nathan Hodges.

I don’t want to talk bad about my mom. I mean, I think she waited around for a while, hoping maybe Dad wasn’t really dead, but she gave up a lot sooner than me and definitely sooner than Sam.

At some point I noticed Mom started looking tired all the time, and I realized she’d